Still Stuck in Traffic

Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion

Anthony Downs

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780815719298
• eBook ISBN: 9780815796558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Transportation Industry
• Index: Business

Congested roads waste commuters' time, cost them money, and degrade the environment. Most Americans agree that traffic congestion is the major problem in their communities—and it only seems to be getting worse. In this revised and expanded edition of his landmark work Stuck in Traffic, Anthony Downs examines the benefits and costs of various anticongestion strategies. Drawing on a significant body of research by transportation experts and land-use planners, he counters environmentalists and road lobbyists alike by explaining why seemingly simple solutions, such as expanding public transit or expanding roads, have unintended consequences that cancel out their apparent advantages. He argues that while there might be some measurable gains from increasing housing densities, most other land-use strategies have little effect. Indeed, the most powerful solutions, including higher gasoline taxes, increased public funding for transit, and highway tolls, are also the least palatable politically. St ill Stuck in Traffic contains new material on the causes of congestion, its dynamics, and its relative incidence in various parts of the country. In clear and realistic terms, Downs seeks to explore why traffic congestion has become part of modern American life and how it can be kept under control.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. The Benefits of Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion
• Chapter 3. How Bad Is Traffic Congestion?
• Chapter 4. Causes of Recent Increases in Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion
• Chapter 5. Incidents and Accidents and Causes of Congestion
• Chapter 6. Strategies for Reducing Congestion and Four Basic Principles of Traffic
• Chapter 7. Reducing Incident-Caused Congestion
• Chapter 8. Increasing Road-Carrying Capacity
• Chapter 9. Creating More Public Transit Capacity
• Chapte 10. Peak-Hour and Other Road Pricing
• Chapter 11. Demand-Side Behavioral Tactics
• Chapter 12. Remedies That Increase Densities
• Chapter 13. Changing the Jobs-Housing Balance
• Chapter 14. Concentrating Jobs in Large Clusters
• Chapter 15. Local Growth Management Policies
• Chapter 16. Traffic Congestion around the World
• Chapter 17. Regional Anticongestion Policies
• Chapter 18. Summary and Conclusions
• Appendix A. The Dynamics of Traffic Congestion
• Appendix B. Graphic Analysis of Peak-Hour Road Pricing
• Appendix C. Translating Gross Residential Densities into Net Residential Densities
• Appendix D. A Spatial Model for Simulating Changes
• Appendix E. Clustering High-Density Housing Near Transit Stops
• Notes
• Index